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English: Main locations of the War of 1812 between the United States and the United Kingdom Français : Principaux théâtres d'opérations de la Guerre de 1812 entre les États-Unis et le Royaume-Uni. Español: Principales teatros de operaciones de la Guerra de 1812 entre los Estados Unidos y el Reino Unido. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Charles Morris' The Dawn of Innovation chronicles the first industrial revolution in the United States. In the first decades of the 19th century, America went from a largely rural economy, with little internal transportation infrastructure, to an industrial powerhouse. Morris details three uniquely American innovations--universal male suffrage, the shift of political power from the elites to the middle classes and the move to mechanized mass production--that resulted in the world's first democratic, middle class, mass consumption society.

He starts his narrative in an unusual place--the Great Lake at the brink of the War of 1812. America and England are locked in a battle of oneupmanship, seeing who can build the biggest and most powerful fleet of ships to control the lakes. The wierd thisng is that the navies rarlely battle, due to a combination of weather, unfair advantage and conservative commanders. But the shipbuilding boom does set the stage for many innovations, including mass production of warships, that served as a precurser for industry changes that set the stage for the revolution.

Morris crosses a wide range of industries in his journey--the role of steam engines in the mill waterworks in Lowell, Massachusetts, the global markets won by American gun makers, like Samuel Colt, building western steamboats to open midwest agriculture to new markets and mass produced clocks by Henry Shreve, which quickly took over the English market due to low cost and high reliability.

Publisher's Weekly summarizes his primary lessons well: “Morris's analysis shines brightest in the final chapter as he compares the United State's past economic growth with the current hyper-expansion of China. Only then, by examining the hurdles China faces in its ascendance to economic superpower, does Morris show how truly innovative the transformation of America was and why it will be impossible to repeat in the future.”

Zillabyte bills itself as “Pandora for sales leads.” Built off a database of wto billion pages and 11 million unique companies, Zillabyte’s engine helps businesses search for prospective customers.
“The technology connects buyers and sellers more efficiently in the business-to-business space,” said founder and COO Roger Huffstetler in an interview at their booth. “I used to work in sales for Twilio, and I know cold-calling sucks when you are selling technology. We are taking an anecdotal understanding of sales and making it analytical.”
The site first prompts visitors with the question “Find me more companies like… .” It then prompts sales professionals to answer “yes or no” to potential clients to create a list options, based on the input. These results are further filterable by geography, size, and so on. Huffstetler said that the really exciting feature, however, is the alert system that notifies businesses when a new customer is found that satisfies their criteria. Zillabyte is based in Palo Alto.

According to xconomy, the San Francisco-based Boxbee took home the best overall new startup award this year at the Launch Conference based on its plans to breathe new life into the messy offline world of urban storage. Simply put, the service aims to simplify the storage process so that users can just box up what they want to store and let it take care of the rest.

For those who are moving, traveling, or are just looking for extra space at home, the startup’s “secure storage hive” allows you to order boxes, which it claims it can deliver to your doorstep within the hour.

Once you’ve packed your boxes, Boxbee helps you to schedule a pickup, taking the lifting, truck-packing and transporting out of your hands. On top of that, the startup claims to go the extra mile to adapt the whole storage process to its busy customers, by allowing you to schedule pickups and returns on the Web or via its mobile app and promises to complete pickup and returns in less than two hours. Well, two hours for “carloads” and next-day pickup and delivery for storage that requires a cargo van or truck.

The service then stores your possessions until you need them again, and provides complementary services to sweeten the deal, allowing you to ship your boxes elsewhere from its app or web dashboard or have them donated. To streamline the process of pickup and returns and offer more flexibility, Boxbee’s dashboard keeps an inventory of images for the contents of each box in your account, including tagged descriptions, which allow you to choose the particular box you need without requiring someone to open it and rifle through its contents. It will then return the box to you in two hours.